I am an award-winning journalist and a New York Times best selling author. My latest book is Newton's Football: The Science Behind America's Game, published by Ballantine in November 2013. My other books include The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes at the Super Bowl and Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. For five years I wrote the By the Numbers sports analytics column for the Wall Street Journal. I have written about sports, music, entertainment, pop culture and politics for a wide variety of national publications including The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post and The Village Voice. I'm a graduate of The University of Chicago and I live in Montclair N.J. with my wife, two kids, and my golden retriever, Tessie.
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12 Lessons In Creativity From The Greatest Super Bowl Ad Ever

What’s the greatest Super Bowl ad of all time? There’s not much debate about that question. By overwhelming consensus, it’s 1984, the Apple Macintosh ad that stunned viewers, went viral when it was re-broadcast on television news, and put one of the world’s most important tech companies on the map,

Indeed, most advertising experts consider it the greatest single ad ever.

On the 30th anniversary of the ad that changed the world, I talked to Steve Hayden, the Chiat/Day advertising VP who wrote that spot. He talked about how Apple founder Steve Jobs commissioned the ad, Blade Runner auteur Ridley Scott brought it to life, and how that 60 second spot which ran just once in January of 1984, changed his life. And changed the world.

Hayden, who recently retired as Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy, explains that pulling off this elegant, impactful spot wasn’t as easy as it looked. In telling the behind-the-scenes story of the commercial, he notes that it could have been diminished or even derailed at any number of points along the road from concept to broadcast. Some of it was luck, but it also took the creative thinking that can still be a game-changer today.

In telling the story of 1984, Hayden shares a dozen lessons in practical creativity that helped make this landmark ad a reality.

Think Big

Stop the world in its tracks.

“That was Steve Jobs’ six-word brief for the spot,” Hayden recalls. “He could be difficult at times, but he was a very inspirational leader.” And the Apple founder didn’t place any limits on the Chiat/Day team. “He didn’t talk about specific media,” says Hayden. “He didn’t talk about Super Bowl commercials. Steve Jobs had never even heard about the Super Bowl.” Jobs was only concerned about making an impact, and when Hayden’s team convinced him that a Super Bowl ad was the best way to do that, he went along.

Have Something To Sell One of the reasons why 1984 was such a great ad is that the Macintosh was a great product. The Macintosh had a graphical user interface, and a mouse when DOS-based computers were using C: prompts and blue screens, and carried price tags that approached five figures. “This is the computer that will change everything,’” Jobs told Hayden. “’You can sit your grandmother in front of this computer and she’ll figure out how it works.” That was kind of a brazen statement in the days of command line prompts.

Tap Into the Times

Sometimes a message just taps into the tenor of the times. That’s exactly what happened with 1984. “It was a watershed year,” Hayden recalls. “Reagan was in the White House. There was an arms race and the Star Wars missile shield.”

There was a vague sense that things were going to change, but no consensus as to how, and a very specific concern about just how prophetic George Orwell’s novel might be.

Hayden, and his art director, Brent Thomas, who was especially well read and well versed on politics and foreign policy, immediately saw the Macintosh in political terms.

“It occurred to us that the advent of Xerography had a tremendous impact on closed societies like the Soviet Union. The Samiztat, the underground press where people were passing around manuscripts, all that was made possible by the Xerox machine.

Imagine what a computer that everyone could use would do? It’s going to change the world in ways we don’t know.

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Ad that changed the world? How does advertising during an obscure game played by one country in the world and ignored by the rest of the world change the world? It is funny however that apple became the very thing they were advertising against. “Think different” the way we tell you to think.

Holden Thanks for joining in. How did 1984 change the world? Because the game was anything but obscure, and 100 million people watched it the first time around, and another 100 million watched it when it was broadcast on the news. And that country, isolated though it may be sometimes, is a world leader in technology, commerce, and, yes, marketing. It may not be a cure for polio, but every ad guy and marketing guy on the planet knows about that ad and wants to make one with the same impact. As to what Apple became, I would suggest that you watch the links to Steve Jobs’ presentations. Visionary though he was, even back in 1984, he had very definate ideas about the way you ought to think, and Apple is a company he built in his own image.

Thanks for joining the conversation, PC. I’m speaking about the commercial, rather than the product, although you’ll note that the Windows PC “borrowed” a lot of its key operating features–graphical user interface, the “desktop” and the mouse just to name three. (When was the last time you use a C: prompt?) And obviously if Apple didn’t gain a foothold in the market in the 1980s, it might not have survived to invent the ipod and iphone.

Hi Allen, thanks for your reply but I respectfully disagree with you. I grew up in Australia and at 52 years of age I remember the birth of apple because I am a tech geek. I think you perhaps like to think that American football is a bigger thing than it actually is. Most outside America view the football here as a bit of a laugh. Something that is only aired once a year at 3 am and watched for 5 minutes before changing channel. It’s the helmets and padding and stopping after every tackle to catch their breaths. Actually many say that Americans only invented it so fat people could play sports. Sorry but I highly doubt any super bowl ad could have an effect on the world, too small a market. And it was apple products and the way they conduct business that drove me away from apple. Don’t forget Steve Jobs was a thief a liar and a conman.

I’m well aware that American football really doesn’t have much of an audience outside of the U.S. I’m an F1 geek, and while it’s one of the most popular sports worldwide, in the U.S. it’s on at 3 am and attracts only a niche audience. I guess we’re parsing the meaning of “change the world” and if you’d like to set the bar higher, that’s your perogative. In any case, I do appreciate your efforts to argue on the merits and keep this conversation polite.

One of the gospels of advertising is when the ad is more popular than the product itself and fails to drive sales, it’s a failure. Few people could actually tell you what Apple was selling after they saw this air. The failure of the Mac, which was the product behind this ad, actually led (in part) to the firing of Steve Jobs.

I find this ad trite, even for the time it aired. I think it has become an icon in hindsight because so many people are viewing it through the lens of what Apple is today. I doubt this ad would even make the top ten if Apple had not become so successful (decades later) and ironically, without this ad having any impact on its success.

Whereas Budweiser owes a lot of its status to their iconic Superbowl ads (the Frogs especially that ticks all the boxes of humor, memorable, etc.) which have boosted them to to the number one alcoholic beverage in the world. I think it’s a crime that they have not been given their due as the most successful Superbowl advertisers in the world. They are the one company that people expect to produce the most talked about ad every year. People associate Budweiser with the Superbowl. Can you say the same about Apple?

Thanks for joining the conversation, Mae. Obviously, if you don’t like 1984, you’re entitled to your opinion. That said, I think it’s pretty hard to argue that the ad was not only influential but effective. Apple sold 72,000 computers in the 100 days following the launch, which surpassed even their most optimistic projections by 50 percent. That strikes me as a sales success. I gathter (from Steve Hayden himself) that the early success caused Jobs to recalibrate those expectations, and re-set the sales goals to a level that the product couldn’t support, partly because their wasn’t any software written for the Mac yet. It was this, among other things, that led to Jobs departure from Apple. The following year’s ad–Lemmings–was one of those things.

As for Budweiser, pretty much anyone–including me–will agree that, year in and year out, they get more mileage out of Super Bowl ads than anyone. Indeed, I wrote a chapter about Super Bowl advertising in my book about the Super Bowl, The Billion Dollar Game, and the major focus was a behind-the-scenes look at how A-B makes and chooses their Super Bowl ads.